Some Mercurial commands can produce a lot of output, and Mercurial will attempt to use a pager to make those commands more pleasant.
To set the pager that should be used, set the application variable:
[pager] pager = less -FRX
If no pager is set in the user or repository configuration, Mercurial uses the environment variable $PAGER. If $PAGER is not set, pager.pager from the default or system configuration is used. If none of these are set, a default pager will be used, typically less on Unix and more on Windows.
You can disable the pager for certain commands by adding them to the pager.ignore list:
[pager] ignore = version, help, update
To ignore global commands like hg version or hg help, you have to specify them in your user configuration file.
To control whether the pager is used at all for an individual command, you can use --pager=<value>:
- use as needed: auto.
- require the pager: yes or on.
- suppress the pager: no or off (any unrecognized value will also work).
To globally turn off all attempts to use a pager, set:
[ui] paginate = never
which will prevent the pager from running.